Rellermeyer Jan Simon wrote:
Hi Emmanuel,
You just committed a bunch of code produced by two person (namely you
and Lorenz), one of them not being a committer (Lorenz). This is
obviously something we can't accept, as Lorenz is not a committer, for
legal reasons : as a committer, you transfer the ownership of your
code to The ASF. If you are not a committer, then the code is assumed
to be owned by the one who wrote the code. Sadly, we don't accept
proxies, so you can't endorse the code he wrote.
Okay, sorry for this. I did not know that the sandboxes are under the same
legal constraints.
In fact, I just put the focus on ownership, but there is also another
aspect we have to take care of: IP issues. As a committer, you are
supposed to understand the way The ASF works, and you are supposed to
have donw the IP clearance before committing some code. The sandbax is
not really different, as soon as it's created by a committer, becasue it
can be moved to the trunk whenever the committer consider necessary to
do so.
Otherwise, we have an incubator, where the IP issues and ownership
issues can be cleared.
Ok, enough legal stuff, because this is a bit different in your case.
Lorenz is a (now former) student of mine and since he wrote the code as part of a master thesis, he had to transfer the rights for the code to ETH which in turn gave me the permission to open source it. I have the forms (somewhere) on my desk. So from our legal point of view, I can actually transfer the ownership of the entire code to the ASF. If this does not work for Apache, we can surely find a better way.
he told me about that when I asked him if becoming a committer was an
option. Namely, he told me that until he get an authorization from the
ETH, the code he produced is not his own, so he cannot contribute to the
project as a committer.
I don't think there is a problem for this transferm, but we probably
have to ask Lorenz if he agrees.
- second option, we can vote Lorenz as a committer,
Yes, I think this is a good idea since he will continue to work on the code. I
already asked him to file some patches.
It was a pleasure to work with him and having him as a committer will be
great !
Assuming that the previous point has been fixed, it would be we better
to know which part has been written by Jan and which part has been
written by Lorenz (not that it's important, but at least for a correct
attribution).
Every class has an @author tag attributing the original author. Do you need
this information in a different format?
We don't put names in @author tags, we refer to the project itself.
However, as everything is stored on svn with the committer name, it's
easy to trace. There are many rason we don't want to see direct
attribution in the code :
- it gives the impression that the code is 'owned' but someone else than
The ASF
- we don't know if we should allow anyone who modified a portion of a
code to add his name in the file
- and it leads some people to contact the one whose name is in the file,
something we want to avoid.
Thanks Jan, I suggest that for the moment we keep the code in the
sandbox, and try to get all those legals stuff out of the way ! As soon
as everyone is aware of what's going on, there is no harm.
--
--
cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org
